Custom Typeface for the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland
One font to generate 200 logos
Helsinki agency 358, led by Mikael Kivelä, needed a scalable logo system for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland—one that could serve hundreds of offices across different countries without manually drawing each variation. TypeMates customised Cera Pro's bold weight into a bespoke font, dubbed Cera MFAF, so logos could be generated systematically rather than hand-crafted individually. Modifications targeted compactness: ascenders were shortened, diacritics adjusted, and several glyphs redesigned to produce a consistent, generatable mark.
Set in Cera Pro
Insights
- Only the bold weight was customised, with the project focused entirely on logo generation.
- The truncated uppercase A—drawn from Helsinki's historic Fazer Café signage—served as the design anchor for other modified letters including M and k, though the A's proportions could not fully dictate those changes.
- The Q and lowercase a were also modified alongside ascender shortening and diacritic adjustment to produce compact logos.
- The final result, Cera MFAF, balances conventional letterforms with distinctive ones rather than letting any single motif dominate.
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